Praxis Quotes

“There is no true word that is not at the same time a praxis. Thus, to speak a true word is to transform the world.”
― Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed

“as social conditions change, so must the knowledge and practices designed to resist them”
― Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment

“In brief, where the Scripture is silent, the church is my text; where that speaks, 'tis but my comment; where there is a joint silence of both, I borrow not the rules of my religion from Rome or Geneva, but the dictates of my own reason.”
― Thomas Browne, Religio Medici

“Often emphasis on identity and lifestyle is appealing because it creates a false sense that one is engaged in praxis. However, praxis within any political movement that aims to have a radical transformative impact on society cannot be solely focused on creating spaces wherein would-be radicals experience safety and support. Feminist movement to end sexist oppression actively engages participants in revolutionary struggle. Struggle is rarely safe or pleasurable.”
― bell hooks, Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center

“Knowing the truth has meaning only as a first step to living the truth day by day.”
― Nancy Pearcey, Total Truth: Liberating Christianity from its Cultural Captivity

“Though his invention worked superbly [...] his theory was a crock of sewage from beginning to end.”
― Vernor Vinge, The Peace War

“Act! act!—it is to that end we are here. Should we fret ourselves that others are not so perfect as we are, when we ourselves are only somewhat less imperfect than they? Is not this our greatest perfection,—the vocation which has been given to us,—that we must labour for the perfecting of others? Let us rejoice in the prospect of that widely extended field which we are called to cultivate! Let us rejoice that power is given to us, and that our task is infinite!”
― Johann Gottlieb Fichte, The Vocation of Man

“It will be seen how subjectivism and objectivism, spiritualism and materialism, activity and suffering, only lose their antithetical character, and thus their existence, as such antitheses in the social condition; it will be seen how the resolution of the theoretical antitheses is only possible in a practical way, by virtue of the practical energy of men. Their resolution is therefore by no means merely a problem of knowledge, but a real problem of life, which philosophy could not solve precisely because it conceived this problem as merely a theoretical one.”
― Robert C. Tucker, The Marx-Engels Reader

“Mere sitting at home and meditating on the divine presence is not enough for our time. We have to come to the end of a long journey and see that the stranger we meet there is no other than ourselves—which is the same as saying that we find Christ in him. For if the Lord is risen, as He said, He is actually or potentially alive in every man.”
― Thomas Merton, Mystics and Zen Masters

“Prison abolition is more than a politic, it’s a daily practice.”
― Shira Hassan

“Ich habe immer versucht, in einem Elfenbeinturm zu leben; aber ein Meer aus Scheiße schlägt an seine Mauern, genug, ihn zum Einsturz zu bringen.”
― Gustave Flaubert

“La filosofía de la praxis es una filosofía crítica de la historia, cuya estructura dialéctica exige que el conocimiento de sus principios no pueda ser ni exclusivamente filosófico ni exclusivamente histórico: más bien, tiene que ser, de un modo determinado y necesario, el reconocimiento de la recíproca compenetración de lo histórico y lo filosófico, inescindiblemente entramadas, al punto de afirmar que no puede haber filosofía sin historia, ni historia sin filosofía.”
― José Rafael Herrera, Principios de filosofía de la praxis

“But philosophy is one thing, praxis is another.”
― Michiel Heyns, I am Pandarus

“God is what you do, not what you believe in.”
― Tim Winton, The Shepherd's Hut

“The fracture between theology and oikonomia, being and action, insofar as it makes the praxis free and 'anarchic', opens in fact, at the same time, the possibility and necessity of its government.
In a historical moment that witnesses a radical crisis of classical conceptuality, both ontological and political, the harmony between the transcendent and eternal principle and the immanent order of the cosmos is broken, and the problem of the 'government' of the world and of its legitimization becomes the political problem that is in every sense definitive.”
― Giorgio Agamben, The Omnibus Homo Sacer

“What happens when politics becomes something a person *has*, rather than something people *do together* as a shared practice?”
― Carla Bergman, Joyful Militancy: Building Thriving Resistance in Toxic Times

“To make our emancipation actual will require both our political mobilizations and our rational arguments; it will require our general strikes and our systematic reflections, our labor and our love, our anxiety and our passion.”
― Martin Hägglund, This Life: Secular Faith and Spiritual Freedom

“Dharma literally means 'truth' or 'norm.' It is a particular way of thinking, a way of viewing the world, which is not a concept but experience. This particular truth is very painful truth—usually truths are. It rings with the sound of reality, which comes too close to home. We become completely embarrassed when we begin to hear the truth. It is wrong to think that the truth is going to sound fantastic and beautiful, like a flute solo. The truth is actually like a thunderbolt. It wakes you up and makes you think twice whether you should stay in the rain or move into the house. Provocative.”
― Chögyam Trungpa

“All this attending educational lectures and reading is greatly tempting, of course, and a great many would-be students spend their whole lives in such study. But in reality they have reached an unseen or unobserved impasse, and are merely milling around base camp and congratulating themselves and their fellow wayfarers on having achieved such dizzying heights.”
― H.M. Forester, The Imaginal Veil

“You’re the keyboard wizard; the Google Scholar; the armchair expert; the one with a quote for every occasion. That’s your Hallmark, if you will excuse the jest ...”
― H.M. Forester, The Imaginal Veil

“Here is a possible pharmacopornographic definition of sexuality: a techno-organic activity corresponding to the type of work praxis in which—to follow Marx’s formulation—
���production is inseparable from the act of producing” and is thus “an activity that has no end product,” because it is “a practice that finds its own achievement in itself, without becoming objectified in any outcome that exceeds it.”
― Paul B. Preciado, Testo Junkie: Sex, Drugs, and Biopolitics in the Pharmacopornographic Era